Journal #10: Assimilation and Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Asian Differences

In the article Assimilation by Shishir Kurup, Shishir includes many experiences that the immigrants have to experience whilst in a foreign country. They show how unsympathetic Americans are towards immigrants and how they don’t fully understand why they came to America. Americans would tell immigrants to go back to their homeland when in fact they came to America in order to escape their homeland. I can fully relate to this as my own grandparents gave up everything they had just so they could come to America so as to escape the Cultural Revolution led by Mao Zedong. It gave me a lot to think about when reading all these excerpts because the suffering and struggles that these people had to endure all had a similar theme which is immigration but they come from different contexts. Lisa Lowe in Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Asian Differences goes on to explain how she herself had to learn to adapt and break away from Japanese tradition. Though wanting to preserve culture, as each generation passes she sees that they keep assimilating more and more into American culture. For example Lisa illustrates in the poem how the social hierarchy is flipped in America where children are placed above the elderly instead of in China where the elderly were in highest esteem.